I was wondering this recently. It's hard to imagine this happening here in the UK. The thought of police in riot gear kicking down doors and waving guns around sounds beyond crazy to me.
American police kill about 1,000 people per year. There's a thing going round saying that US police in March killed more people than UK police killed since 1900 but none of the sources look particularly reliable.
Several bad shootings over decades? What's your point? What a strange thing to say.
We don't shoot many people, America do. It's such a huge, cavernous gulf in magnitude that I have no idea what point you're trying to make with your last paragraph.
I'm saying that it's wrong to think that armed police officers do better than armed US officers. We mostly don't have armed officers over here. Where they are armed mistakes happen and people die, so it's important to keep UK officers unarmed.
Also: yes, even those few deaths are totally unacceptable in the UK. People are shocked by police shootings; investigations are rigorous. Contrast that to the US where shootin a dog sparks mass outrage but shooting a drunk pregnant woman doesn't.
No knock entries are indeed insane - I don't understand the scenario that would be required for a no-knock entry to be the only acceptable option. Are the police scared of the occupants firing guns at them? That would be ironic.
For one, you could detect these no-knocking individuals quite easily:
- Cameras on the exterior of the property
- Motion lights, motion sensors, motion bells are all quite cheap.
And re: destruction/obfuscation of electronic evidence-
-"One-click" destruction scripts, etc.
- TrueCrypt volumes, everywhere. Circuit breakers, power strips, etc. with switches. If you don't manage to destroy the volume, no aggressor will be able to access it.
- Degaussing setups for spinning disks, activated by similar mechanisms.
This stuff is pretty cheap, easily available. Anybody caught by these technically-incompetent police executing no-knock raids deserves to be caught.
Hell, if you don't have a few 6TB volumes full of random bits, labeled "Evidence," you aren't doing it right. Gotta tie up those investigative resources somehow.
Which would be exactly what's not happening if "a guy has a gun".
Either someone is in danger, in which case no-knock isn't needed, or they're not, in which case why the hell is a SWAT raid being carried out on the basis of an anonymous tip?
